I will never purport to be an expert on the beginnings of the Revolutionary War, nor will I purport to be an expert on the signers of the Declaration of Independence, nor will I purport to be an expert on what was going through the minds of people in the late 18th century.
Here's what I learned in my formative years... People of the colonies were tired of British rule. They wanted to be able to govern themselves, to have their own way of doing things, and to be responsible for themselves. Pretty noble, I think. And, with the help of the French and the Germans, they went to war for those noble purposes. And the war was won. I guess that's a good thing. Had to do it again a few years later, but the British finally figured out that this very large hunk of land probably wasn't worth governing from London.
And we, as a nation, grew. We expanded to those hunks. I grew up in one of them. And I now live in one of the original hunks. And we prospered and continued to grow. We, as a nation, grew to be one of the greatest superpowers in the world. We went to war several times (the Mexican American war, World War I, World War II, the Korean Conflict, Vietnam, Iraq I, Iraq II, Afghanistan, and probably a few others that I can't remember) and we've done pretty well in those. And. over the years, we've become a superpower.
Superpowers (I'm not going to say dynasty, because 237 years just can't constitute that) come and they go. Superpowers usually advocate for a way of life. The Soviet Union advocated marxist communism, China advocates a variant of that, Saudi Arabia (make no mistake, they're a superpower) advocates an islamic government.
As I look around the world, it appears as though our country is on a path to support democracy. Again, I guess that's noble. Democracy is a good thing, and it's worked pretty well in the diversity that is our nation. And we believe that democracy is something that should be supported worldwide. That's where we've got it wrong, my friends.
What we should be advocates for is something more basic than a form of government.
We should be advocates for peace. "We don't negotiate with terrorists" is a common policy. I just heard on the news "we need to pave the way for democracy". We hear it every single day, where this country is in the face of other countries advocating democracy while those countries are warring internally and we are telling them they must be democratic. Stop it. Just stop it.
평화. That's the Korean word for peace. Pyeonghwa. When we're talking to countries about what's going on and what we want, that's what we should want. Not democracy, not to be an ally, not to create a global economy where they can be a part. PEACE. That's what we should want for them.
And we shouldn't be afraid to talk about how we're not peaceful. We shouldn't be afraid to talk about how we spy on our own people. We shouldn't be afraid to talk about basic human rights and how we struggle with providing them.
Think, for just a few minutes, about how the conversations around and about our foreign policy would change if we advocated for peace and not democracy. [Here is your thinking part]
The funny thing about peace is that it's something we have to seek. It won't find us. And that's where this blog starts to end. We can't advocate for peace if we don't seek it ourselves.
I tattooed 평화 on my left arm to remind me that I need to always seek it.
